Dedication
This book is dedicated to our fathers, Silvan S. Schweber and
Fred S. Findling, whose hardships were honed into wisdom
and whose wisdom was shared with love.
“Like the crying blood of Zechariah, which could not be
brought to stillness, the blood of our brothers and sisters cry
out from under the foundations of Europe. …These immortals
live with us, in us. They will live in us forever. This it is that
makes our hearts so heavy—and our luggage still heavier. Let
us carry it together.” — Simon Rawidowicz, Studies in Jewish Thought (1974)

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Acknowledgements
In writing this book, we are indebted to more people than we can name.
Numerous friends and colleagues read and edited chapters, giving us
invaluable feedback and historical insights. Others allowed us to exploit
their expertise in other ways, by making dinners, taking care of our children
or holding our calls. First and foremost, we thank our husbands, Jonathan
and Steven, for their patience and support. We also thank our kids, Talia,
Max, and Sara, for teaching us anew about the importance of this project.
To Sara Lee and Audrey Friedman Marcus, we owe thanks for setting us on
the course of writing this book in the first place. For seeking out countless
resources and helping us vet them, we thank Howard Freedman. For sharing
her expertise in early childhood Jewish education, we thank Janet Harris.
Stephen Feinberg, Director of National Outreach at the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum, checked every word of this book on his own time, for
which we remain in his debt and will repay him in pastry. Jordan Ottenstein
and Jessica Krasnick caringly read an early draft of the book, and Maggie
Wunnenberg carefully fact-checked the final draft. We are also grateful to
Rachel Brodie, Adrian Schrek, David Shneer, Elias Stahl, Ilan Vitemberg,
and Adam Weisberg for helping us fi ll in gaps and fi ll out our knowledge.
The faults, gaffs and omissions of the book are our own; we thank these
people, though, for narrowing the pool of mistakes. Finally, we will always
be indebted to this book itself, as it was through the work of writing it that
our very real friendship was forged.

INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the Holocaust has come to occupy a position of tremendous
power in the American imagination. It has become a moral reference point not
only for American Jews, but for almost all Americans regardless of religion,
ethnicity, or political persuasion. Indeed, as Peter Novick has written in his
book, The Holocaust in American Life, the Holocaust has become such a dominant
metaphor for Americans that references to it abound in political life regardless of
context. In other words, you are as likely to hear people invoke the Holocaust at
a pro-life rally, for example, as you are to hear people invoke it at a pro-choice
demonstration, a pro-Israel or anti-Israel event, an anti-hunger campaign, etc.
In the U.S., the Holocaust has become so powerful rhetorically that it serves as
a rallying cry for almost any cause, even opposite sides of the same cause. And
the U.S. is not unique in this regard. In many other countries across Europe and
across the world, the Holocaust has become a focal point of attention, in one way
or another.
Why has this happened? We’d argue that it’s the moral power of the Holocaust
which accounts for this magnetism; we’d suggest that the seeming moral clarity
of the Holocaust has drawn the attention of the world. This is a history, after all,
which people think of as having crucial moral lessons, maybe the most important moral lessons we stand to learn as human beings. Moreover, they are moral
lessons that seem to garner agreement across the political spectrum. It is this
clarity that draws people from decidedly different political positions to call on
the Holocaust in support of their platforms. It is this moral clarity which entices
people to use the emotional weight of the Holocaust as a metaphorical bullhorn,
amplifying their arguments. As a side note, perhaps, we have often thought
that when the immediacy of the losses of September 11 recede further into the
past, an analogous kind of political utilization may occur with its events. As the
Holocaust has been for most Jews, 9/11 is now for many Americans; though
of course radically different in scale, timing and circumstance, both events are
emotionally devastating and morally clear cut since the murder of innocents is
always, utterly wrong. It is out of this same moral urge that we are drawn to
teach about the Holocaust regardless of where we teach: public school, synagogue school, Jewish, Catholic or Christian day school.
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In the wake of destructions, large and small, immediate and more distant, we
are often moved to draw lessons, perhaps as a vehicle to soften the blows of loss.
Learning from loss extends the possibility of hope; it provides the thread from
which a silver lining can be sewed. Consider the slogan “Never Again!” While
it may have served first as a rallying cry during the 1970s to drum up support for
Jews trapped and discriminated against in the former USSR, its psychological
staying power may be explained by its redemption of the Holocaust’s tragedy.
“Never Again!” allows us to make some use of the Holocaust; it allows us some
relief from its horrors, allows us at least the temporary conviction that things will
be different in the future, that we can make a difference.
Other lessons that people have drawn from this history seem to extend the same
analgesic. Such lessons include the imperatives to: defend the rights of minorities, speak out against injustice and oppression in all of its forms, safeguard the
freedoms of democracy, question personal participation in bureaucratic systems,
support the state of Israel, support an independent Palestine, and fundamentally
preserve the dignity and uphold the sacredness of all human life. The lessons—
whichever ones are embraced—are easy to arrive at. We don’t mean that the
lessons are easy to enact in our lives or to teach to students, but they’re usually
easy for people to identify with and to connect to the events of the Holocaust.
The seeming moral clarity of the Holocaust stems not only from its overarching
wrongness, however, but also from the clarity of its actors’ roles. In other words,
we know that the Nazis and their collaborators were the bad guys; the rescuers
and resisters were good; the bystanders allowed and perpetuated atrocity. And
the victims were victimized; they were thus innocents to be remembered as
martyrs, heroes and heroines.
As Americans and as Brits, Australians, and Canadians, we’re usually positioned as rescuers. In fact, some have argued persuasively that one of the reasons
the Holocaust has become so popular in the American imagination is that it is
our last good war, the last moment in our collective memory as a nation that we
were rescuers, heroes, unreservedly good. In contrast with our role in Vietnam
and in a host of other, more recent events (some might add as a force of cultural
imperialism), as regards the Holocaust, we were the ones who liberated the concentration camps, who fought and defeated fascism, who fi nally ended World
War II. You need only imagine the entry points for visitors to the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum to understand the power of this conception; as
visitors travel to the main exhibit areas, the elevators show fi lms taken during
the liberation of the concentration camps. Visitors are therefore positioned as
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American liberators. They are, in effect, introduced to the Holocaust museum
through the “eyes” of liberators. The role we played during the Holocaust epitomizes how we’d like to perceive ourselves as a country more generally; we like
to see ourselves as defenders of democracy, a nation which is selfless and heroic,
triumphant and good.

The Myth of Moral Clarity
Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is a trap. While it may be alluring to
think of Holocaust history as morally simple, it isn’t. The large categories and
the broad lessons may be simple, but when you really start to investigate their
historical realities and more specifically, their implications, they become very,
very complex, not only for American Jews, but for all Americans, for all Jews
and for all thinking people. It may be tempting to think that as public school,
Jewish or Christian educators, we serve our students best by simplifying history,
by glossing over its considerable complexities, by clarifying its moral messages.
The premise of this book is that the opposite is true. Following the arguments
articulated in Katherine Simon’s groundbreaking research, Moral Questions in the
Classroom, we are fully convinced that, as she writes, “The moral, existential and
intellectual are intertwined [in education]; exploration in one realm often augments the others.”1 In other words, delving deeply into the complicated moral
terrain of the Holocaust not only serves our students intellectually, but morally
and spiritually as well, and ultimately, religiously. If we want our students to be
empowered to make hard decisions in the complicated world they will inherit,
we would do best to help them illuminate the complexities of history. This
means that we cannot teach stereotyped roles or simplified lessons.
An example of what we mean here may help to concretize our point. Consider
the category of victims. Ask yourself what words come to mind when you hear
the phrase, “Holocaust victim.” (Think specifically about “Holocaust victim” as
the word, “victim” alone may carry quite different associations.) Do you find
on the list of associated words a notion of martyrdom, of Kiddush HaShem (sanctification of God’s name), of innocence, of heroism? We would be surprised if
somewhere in your associations these themes didn’t appear.
And yet, the approach to Holocaust education that we are advocating in this
book would have you bear in mind as you plan your Holocaust unit the ugly
reality that not all victims behaved heroically (although those are the accounts
we most like to read). There were, among the victims, parents who sacrificed
1

children, sisters who stole from brothers, children who betrayed parents, people
who within the concentration camp system occupied the liminal status of the
[moral] “grey zone” in Primo Levi’s magnificent wording. Of course it is vitally
important to recall that the systems of Nazi terror forced people into roles they
wouldn’t otherwise occupy; nonetheless, the idea that Holocaust victimization
yielded a huge range of human behavior among victims should make it into your
curriculum.
Likewise, the idea that not all perpetrators were cruel should be represented in
your teaching. The vast majority of perpetrators, in all probability, were not the
animalistic killers portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List but people we
would recognize, indeed people with traits we need to recognize in ourselves.
The perpetrators of this atrocity were people, fully human; they had aspirations, families, careers and foibles. (In this line of argument, we are closer to
adherents of Christopher Browning’s claims in his book, Ordinary Men, than to
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s position in his, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Ultimately,
though, we consider both works useful in teaching about the Holocaust, which
we discuss in greater depth below.) To teach about the perpetrators as a morally complicated group is exceedingly challenging, but utterly necessary. Were
bystanders perpetrators? By doing nothing and allowing evil to flourish, were
they culpable for the tragedies of the Holocaust? And, if so, to what degree, and
how do you decide? Even the question of who constitutes the category of perpetrators, therefore, is morally complex.
Finally, not all rescuers were wholly altruistic or uncomplicatedly good. There
were rescuers who exploited those they hid, extracting money, and labor, in
some cases even sexual favors. Regarding Americans, while we were rescuers,
liberators, fighters against Nazism, White Americans were also simultaneously
racists and bystanders (at least most of us) to home-front injustices. Our immigration quotas severely restricted those who could find refuge on our shores.
Our Black soldiers were fighting on two fronts. And our Japanese American
neighbors were sequestered in internment camps. So, even rescue, the most valorized role associated with Holocaust history, must be recognized, at least in some
senses, as a morally complicated category.
While working as an educator on the March of the Living program, Debbie
learned an important lesson about not viewing Holocaust survivors as onedimensional figurines of heroic icons.
Debbie: Bella, a Holocaust survivor who was liberated from Auschwitz, traveled
with the teenagers to Poland and Israel. Bella had moved to Berkeley, California
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after the war and was a former hippie who was active in Berkeley’s liberal political scene. On the trip, I became increasingly frustrated with Bella because she
would encourage the teenagers to sneak out of their rooms after their curfew
to smoke cigarettes with her, publicly defying the rules of the trip. That experience helped me readjust my stereotypical image of Holocaust survivors. In
short, because Bella was a survivor did not mean she was necessarily a role
model (even if the students on that trip will likely remember smoking with Bella
fondly). Throughout your teaching, we encourage you to present survivors and
perpetrators and bystanders in the fullness of their humanity, rather than as personifications of stereotypes.
It may sound from this introduction that we are advocating a kind of cynicism
in teaching about the Holocaust that we are recommending that all heroism be
diminished, that only the bleakest truths be taught. That is not what we are suggesting at all. Instead, what we believe and what forms the basic premise for this
book is that in teaching about historical actors in the fullness of their humanity,
we are more likely to treat each other humanely, whether victims, perpetrators,
bystanders, collaborators, resisters or rescuers. For aren’t all of us at one time or
another (indeed sometimes simultaneously) in all of these roles?

The Challenges of Teaching: One Example Not to Follow
What does it mean to teach about historical actors in the fullness of their
humanity? On the one hand, as mentioned above, it means that we avoid valorizing, ennobling and condemning so much that we forget that the Holocaust
involved real people in truly complex situations. In other words, we need to
do our utmost to understand the moral complexities of the situations in which
people found themselves. We don’t pretend for a minute that we can know how
it might have felt to be Anne Frank hiding in the annex, Elie Wiesel traveling
in a boxcar, or Primo Levi reciting poetry to himself in Auschwitz. But what
we can understand is something of how complicated it was to live in that time,
in those places, and specifically, how morally complicated. The real question at
the heart of the endeavor, then, is: How do we do that? How do we teach our
students to gain an appreciation for moral complexity rather than to diminish it,
especially given the kinds of mythologies that shroud this history? We’ll begin
by giving an example from Simone’s teaching of what not to do.
Simone: By the time you read this, I will have taught Holocaust history for almost
18 years, to students in grades four all the way through college. For the fi rst 10
years, when I taught mostly middle and high school students, I did what a lot of
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good history teachers do. I taught the informational content: the names, dates,
places, what happened where and why. I don’t mean that my teaching wasn’t
interactive; it was. But I would purposely hold off engaging the tough moral
questions until the close of the unit, when we would spend one or sometimes
two class sessions on the implications of this history. “Now that you understand
what happened during the Holocaust and have some sense of why,” I’d ask my
students, “What is it you think we’re supposed to learn from the Holocaust?”
The students and I would come up with a list of moral lessons, profound ones
even, and then we’d move on to the next unit or the next course.
When I think back about why I structured my unit that way for so long, I do
have justifications—good ones even. Foremost among them was my dedication
to content coverage. I firmly believed then that in order to draw lessons and
make moral judgments, you needed to have the historical information under
your belt, so I structured the two sequentially: have the students learn the information first, then they’ll be prepared to make sound judgments. Over time, this
conviction changed. While I still believe that students need rich wells of information in order to draw up meaningful lessons, I came to think that the best
way to teach about the Holocaust was to do both in tandem: to have students
muddle through the thick mud of moral issues as a way to examine the historical
information itself. The moral issues, when fully explored, help students understand the historical circumstances and vice versa; the historical circumstances,
when fully explored, necessitate discussion and exploration of the complex moral
issues at play.
When I sat down to think about it, I came to realize that my own insecurities
and inexperience as a teacher were preventing me from engaging kids in tough
moral questions throughout studying the Holocaust. I think I was afraid of looking stupid. As teachers, we’re trained to have answers. We serve as role models
because of our knowledge, because of our competence, because of our abilities
to guide students. Engaging students in discussions of tough moral questions in
class, in some sense, is to compromise all three, at least it can feel like that. You
don’t know what will happen in a discussion of thorny moral problems, and
engaging tough moral questions is to admit publicly to our students how little
we understand, how little we know, how much we have yet to learn or figure
out. I didn’t know how to do that. I wasn’t trained to lead conversations about
morally complex events for which there can be no right answers. (As a side note,
perhaps, I think it’s fair to say that we have very few models for that kind of
discussion in our public spheres. Think of a presidential debate, where in order
to appear competent, you must condense the moral complexities of a question
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rather than explore them. In order to model leadership, you must appear utterly
convinced of a particular side rather than appear to understand multiple angles
on an issue.) To facilitate a discussion of a morally complex issue, by contrast,
requires teachers to hold their own answers in check, to fully expose the values
underlying students’ opinions, and to weigh moral issues critically.
According to Katherine Simon’s research, I was not alone in my proclivities for
avoidance; it is common for both public and religious school teachers to avoid
raising such issues and to close down such questions when they do surface in
classrooms. Consider the brief exchange Simon observed in a Jewish day school
where the students were studying Elie Wiesel’s famous memoir, Night:
Gary [a student, asks]: How can Wiesel still believe? How is it possible for
anyone to believe in God after the Holocaust?
Ms. Sherman [the teacher, replies]: That’s an important question. You really
should bring it up with the rabbi in your religion class.2
While I understand Ms. Sherman’s unwillingness to engage Gary’s question,
the reasonableness of deflecting Gary’s inquiry to a rabbi’s expertise, I can also
attest to the greater power of that kind of teaching which delves students into such
questions fully and consistently, whether they bring up the questions or you do. I
know from my own practice that once my philosophy shifted to structure those
kinds of discussions throughout the curriculum, my impact on students increased
tremendously. They learned more, more deeply, and more enduringly.
As learners, we all have a natural tendency to connect what is foreign to what
is known to create understanding and make meaning. That is, we compare what
we don’t know to what we do. Consider for a moment a time when you traveled
to a new city, state or country. Oftentimes, travelers will say things like, “This
French cafe reminds me of the coffee house near my house.” Or, “The balmy
weather in Florida is so different from the cold climate at home.” The process
of comparing what is not known to what is known enables us to make sense of
new information. Debbie witnessed this natural tendency repeatedly over nearly
a decade of traveling with teenagers to Poland and Israel on the March of the
Living program.
Debbie: Depending on current world events at the time, students would naturally compare the Holocaust to other genocides. During the early 1990s, for
example, students would say things like, “The Holocaust is being repeated again
today in Bosnia.” In the late 1990s, I heard students compare the Holocaust to
2

Ibid, 86.
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the genocide taking place in Kosovo. My initial inclination was to discount those
comparisons for fear that comparing other genocides to the Holocaust would
somehow diminish its severity or distinctiveness. I would respond emphatically
with statements like, “Six million people aren’t being systematically murdered
in Bosnia like they were in the Holocaust.” My reluctance to have my students
make these comparisons is understandable, but ultimately was not beneficial to
their learning. Rather than shut down students’ natural inclinations to compare
events, I learned not only to encourage those comparisons, but also to help students contrast current events with the Holocaust to better inform their learning.
As the events of the Holocaust recede deeper into history, this process becomes
even more important. As educators, we need to find ways to help students grapple with and comprehend a history that most students will have an increasingly
more distant relationship to as the years pass.

A Guide to this Guide: What it is and What it is Not
We have designed this book to help you avoid many of the mistakes that we
and all teachers make in teaching about the Holocaust. Throughout this book
we include lessons learned from our own teaching experience and disclose some
of our own family histories in the hopes that doing so will engender deeper
learning and will enable you to teach about the Holocaust with more integrity.
We want you to be able to guide your students through its complicated moral
terrain from the first day of your unit through the last one, and we want you to
enter your classroom unafraid of engaging students’ queries. We’re not discouraging your students from bringing their questions up with their rabbis, grown
ups, priests or parents, too; we simply want to make sure that the questions don’t
get shut down in your classroom. We hope that you will encourage inquiry and
discussion and caution you not to confuse students’ questions or doubts with disrespect. Towards that end, each chapter in this book contains ethical dilemmas
and pivotal, moral questions, issues and scenarios to encourage student questioning and to help focus the discussions you have with your students.
The chapters in this book are organized by theme, which creates a vaguely, but
not wholly, chronological architecture. As a result, certain ideas, topics or events
may appear in more than one chapter. For example, the Wannsee Conference
appears in the chapters entitled, Naming the Holocaust, The War, Perpetrators, and
Aftermath. To ease your reading of the chapters, we decided not to reference
these overlaps in the chapter text. In other words, we don’t include references

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like “See Chapter 12 for more information about….” Instead, we encourage you
to use the index to aid you in your searches.
Each chapter begins with an introduction, followed by big ideas and key terms.
The big ideas are the main, overarching concepts that we hope your students will
learn. The key terms are the words, phrases and names associated with those big
ideas. Scientists ask “robust questions” as part of scientific inquiry; they look at
the big picture while probing the details. We have designed the big ideas and key
terms sections to mirror that approach; the big ideas relate to the big picture of the
chapter and the key terms relate to the details. For example, one big idea related
to resistance during the Holocaust is that acts of resistance were heroic, regardless of their outcomes. A key term of this big idea is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
In deciding what to teach, we suggest you first read the big ideas section of each
chapter. Depending on whether you are teaching a single class, a short unit, a
semester or entire year on the topic of the Holocaust, the big ideas sections will
help you determine what you want your students to learn and to focus your curriculum accordingly.
Please bear in mind as you use this text that we have specifically avoided
writing a history of the Holocaust. In other words, this book does not cover
everything that is now known about the Holocaust. Instead, each chapter provides an overview of the teaching issues pertinent to its theme, a significant
overview of content in that area, teaching ideas, and resources for classroom use
and for further study for you and your students. Almost regardless of the reasons
you’re teaching about the Holocaust, we think that the issues outlined in the following chapters are integral to a coherent, thorough and meaningful education
on the topic. Whether, for example, you’re teaching about the Holocaust because
it is one of the major historic events of the 20th century, because it continues to
shape the world stage today, because it illuminates the tragic powers of antisemitism and racism, because it can aid in understanding the psychological processes
by which victimizers oppress and the victimized respond, or whether because
you know that study of the Holocaust can enrich your students’ senses of what
it means to be a Jew, a Christian or indeed a human being, the chapters in this
guide can be used to form a unit of study.
As you’ll see, with the exception of the first chapter, (Teaching Young Children
About the Holocaust) all the teaching ideas and resources are designed for middle
and high school students, not for students in lower grades. This reflects our
conviction that the Holocaust should not be part of the formal school curriculum for young children, except in exceptional circumstances. To accommodate
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such circumstances (Yom HaShoah commemorations, communities with large
populations of survivors and their families, etc.), we have included a number of
single-session activities for teachers of young children. The bulk of this book,
however, is dedicated to the teaching of much older students—students who
we feel are mature enough to begin tackling this subject with the seriousness it
deserves.

Closing Thoughts
Teaching about the Holocaust is necessarily an act of shaping memory, of forging the consciousness our students have. In creating our students’ links to this
past, we are helping to define their understandings of the present, and we are
helping orient them towards particular futures. Of course as teachers, we are not
alone in influencing their memory of the Holocaust; they will learn from their
families, their friends, from the movies, from television, books, magazines and
websites. They will hear urban myths about the Holocaust (“Wasn’t Hitler part
Jewish?”), contested rumors, even deniers’ insults, the detritus of an information
age and an ever-expanding politic. In our classrooms, by contrast, we have the
unique opportunity to shape our students’ memory of the Holocaust in carefully
thought-through ways, to structure their learning caringly, with serious regard
for the nature of the subject matter, for the needs of our students individually
and the demands of our religious communities as collectives. We thereby stand
in a position of special responsibility: to aid in fashioning the collective memory
of future generations. We hope that this book helps you in accomplishing that
formidable job by helping you navigate the incredibly complex moral terrain of
teaching about the Holocaust.

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TEACHING YOUNG CHILDREN
ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST

A group of Roma prisoners congrgate in the Rivesaltes internment camp in France, 1936–1942. USHMM,
courtesy of Elizabeth Eidenben.

T

o date, there have been very few studies on how old kids should be
before they learn about the Holocaust as part of their formal school
studies. Nonetheless, there are lots of opinions people hold about the subject of
how old is old enough, and people often hold their opinions passionately, basing
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their ideas on their personal convictions, experiences or dispositions. Roughly
speaking, there are three schools of thought on the issue.
In the first are those who argue that early childhood should be a protected
time, a time when adults need to shield the curious minds of children from the
harsher aspects of the world they inhabit. This group tends to argue that teaching the Holocaust to youngsters is also developmentally inappropriate; young
minds are simply not sophisticated enough to comprehend the complexities of
the Holocaust, and young hearts are not well equipped to tackle the enormity of
this tragedy. This group asks, “Why risk giving children nightmares needlessly?
When the students are old enough and more mature, they will be ready to learn,
and until then, we shouldn’t teach about it.”
In the second group are those who claim that it is the duty of adults to teach
children, even young children, about the Holocaust. While children cannot fully
comprehend its complexities, they can nonetheless begin to learn about it in a
simplistic fashion. This group’s proponents tend to agree with Jerome Bruner,
the educational theorist who believed that “there is an appropriate version of
any skill or knowledge that may be imparted at whatever age one wishes to
begin teaching—however preparatory the version may be.”3 Kids can be taught
what racism is, for example, or how important it is to speak up when someone
is being hurt. In other words, kids can be taught about the social dynamics at
play during the Holocaust as a way to prepare them for learning about its specific
history in greater depth later. These proponents consider it better for students to
be ushered into Holocaust knowledge slowly than not to be exposed to it at all;
otherwise kids will be utterly unprepared for its horrors when they do encounter
the Holocaust later.
In a third group are those who advocate teaching young children about the
Holocaust without intellectually simplifying or emotionally minimizing its tragic
content. According to this argument, it is the unenviable role of teachers sometimes to confront their students with the horrors of the world, the Holocaust
among them. And it is better for kids to learn about the Holocaust for the first
time from adults who can shape the experience carefully and caringly than for
kids to learn about the Holocaust for the first time randomly, from a television show, older kids’ insensitive renderings or widely circulated rumors. As
the Holocaust survivor Batsheva Dagan puts it, “Today’s children grow up in a

world without secrets”4 —better then to help them navigate what they will learn
about anyway.
Most people can find some claim in each of these orientations to agree with.
In fact, there is a way in which all three orientations are compatible if the age
barriers between the orientations are left unexplicated. The question at the heart
of all three, though, is still “how old is old enough?” or, put differently, “how
young is too young?” What could we take as a sign that a child is ready to move
from the protected zone of early childhood to a later stage of gentle exposure to
the Holocaust, and then again, from gentle exposure to full confrontation? At
what age or grade should we teach kids formally about the Holocaust or some
preparatory version of it? And, more importantly, if we are going to teach young
kids about the Holocaust, what should that preparatory version look like?
Although far from conclusive, Simone ran one of the only studies of what happens to young kids when they learn about the Holocaust as part of the formal
school curriculum. She found that students in the third grade were too young
to learn this material in any depth. While the parents and teachers in that study
thought the kids were old enough to confront these horrors, the kids themselves
wished they had been older before learning about it in school. If we are serious
about listening to kids’ voices and valuing their opinions, the results of this study
seem pretty persuasive. (It’s also clear that more studies need to be done.)
We base our recommendations in part on this empirical research, which is
why we advocate strongly that kids in Kindergarten through third grade not be
exposed to the Holocaust as part of their formal school curriculum. That is, we
don’t advocate that you teach about the Holocaust to this age child. While you
ought to teach preparatory Holocaust education to young kids—teaching them
the importance of accepting difference, caring for the hurt, not judging others
superficially, thinking critically, Jewish mitzvot, etc.—we don’t advocate that
you teach about the Holocaust directly until fi fth or sixth grade at the earliest.
And, even then, we hope you’ll make accommodations by teaching kids in those
grades about the Holocaust’s more redemptive aspects only—rescue, resistance,
and stories that soften the harder blows of this history. We think that the earliest
young people ought to be taught about the Holocaust in depth is when they are
older, when as a group, they are mature enough to be appropriately staggered by
its enormity and developed enough to discuss its implications. Some communi-

ties insist that students become bar or bat mitzvah, seventh grade before studying
about the Holocaust in-depth; others put off study until even later.
As conservative as it may sound, this means that we advise you to keep younger
students out of school-wide Holocaust commemoration activities if the ceremonies are to be overly explicit; in other words, if you are planning to commemorate
the Holocaust in your school, plan to have separate arenas running simultaneously so that the K-third kids can have their own program separate from the
older kids. This will allow you to help both groups commemorate an important
part of Jewish history in an age-appropriate manner. Below are some ideas to
help you plan such single-session educational commemorations.

Teaching Ideas
Pre- Kindergarten (ages three/four/five)– Kindergarten
1. Candles: Bring to class an array of different types of candles—Sabbath
candles, a havdalah candle (braided candle used in the service that marks the
end of Sabbath), birthday cake candles, decorative candles, and a yahrzeit
(memorial) candle. Ask the students to describe what they know about each
kind of candle and if they’ve used each kind in their home, and when. (This
is an important step since it may let you know if your students have lost
a family member.) Then, explain that some candles we light to celebrate
happy events (birthdays); some we light to mark special times (Sabbath);
and some we light to mark sad events, to remember people we love who are
no longer with us.5
2. Happy/Sad Holidays: Ask your students to move around the room with
their bodies showing that they feel happy. Then ask your students to move
around the room with their bodies showing that they feel sad. Then ask,
what did you do to show that you felt happy? What did you do to show
that you felt sad? How did you feel doing each? Explain that in the Jewish
tradition, we have some holidays that are happy (Simhat Torah, Purim, Tu
B’Shevat) and some that are sad (Yom HaShoah or the 10th of the Hebrew
month of Tevet). Just as people sometimes feel happy and sometimes feel
sad, so we have holidays that either celebrate happy times or help people
remember sad times. Use an artistic medium to have students render happy
holiday feelings and sad holiday feelings. (For example, they may make
paper plate faces, paintings, drawings, collages, body tracings of both feelings, etc.)
5

Thanks to Janet Harris, Berkeley, California-based early childhood educator, for this activity idea.

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3. In God’s Image: Sitting together, explain to your students that it says in
the Hebrew Bible that people are made “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:
26). That means that people are made to be like God, not the same as God,
but like God in some way. Ask what your students think is like God in each
of them. What do they think is “Godly” in them? What do they like about
themselves? What do they like about each other? Then ask if we’re all of us
made to be like God, what does that mean we’re doing to God when we
hurt each other?
4. Losing Things: Ask the students to imagine for a moment that they’ve lost
something they love—maybe a stuffed animal, a pet or a special toy; what
do they think would make them feel better if they knew they wouldn’t
find it again? What might they do to make someone else feel better when
they’ve lost something (or someone) they won’t see again? (There are a
number of sweet children’s books that could help you talk about this issue
further. Flora’s Blanket is about a little bunny at bed-time who has lost
her special blanket. She finds it in the end, but you could talk about how
she felt before she found it; the same goes for Laney’s Lost Mama, which
is about a little girl getting separated from her mother in a department store.
While this story has a happy ending, too, it is more conducive to talking
about losing people and the feelings you might have in that situation.)
5. Jewish Life Before the Holocaust: Another appropriate way to introduce this age child to what they will later learn about the Holocaust is to
acquaint them with stories about Jewish life before the Holocaust. (Because
shtetl life is often imbued with a kind of nostalgia, these books tend to be
utterly charming. These are good texts for educators wary of any explicit
Holocaust content.) A few recommendations include: Joseph Had a Little
Overcoat, which is graphically interesting, playfully ironic, fun for parents
and kids from birth on up and even includes Yiddish song lyrics and music.
Although Hannah’s Sabbath Dress is set in a non-specific time period,
it has a sweet “old-world” feel about it and is appropriate for ages three
and up. You Never Know: A Legend of the Lamed-Vavniks has a
specific European setting and is appropriate for slightly older kids, four to
eight. The Feather Merchants & Other Tales of the Fools of Chelm
is good for slightly older kids, five to eight, since the younger ones don’t
understand its kind of silliness.

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First–Third Grades
Many of the activities in the above section can be adapted for use in the older
grades. For example, you may use the same candles activity for older kids,
explaining more specifically who lights a yahrzeit candle, when, and why, etc.
1. Kaddish Yitom—Mourner’s Prayer: Sing or play a recording of the song,
“Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head up high, and whistle a happy
tune, and no one knows that I am afraid….” Make sure everyone understands the words of this song before asking the question, “Why would
someone who felt afraid whistle a happy tune?” (The kids will come up
with good explanations.) Then, ask why someone who felt sad might say
a happy prayer? Explain that there’s a prayer called the Mourner’s Prayer
that makes people feel better when they’re mourning, when they miss
someone they love who’s no longer there. The words of the Mourner’s
Prayer express our belief in the greatness of God, and when people who
are in mourning say that prayer, they feel better (maybe not all at once, but
after saying the prayer every day for a while they do). Explain that in some
synagogues, when someone is mourning, everyone in the congregation
says the Mourner’s Prayer with that person while in other congregations;
just the people who are mourning recite the prayer. (Your kids may know
how it’s done in their congregation. They may also have someone in their
family who has said that prayer.) What’s nice about saying a prayer with
other people at the same time? What’s helpful about saying the prayer
alone? Brainstorm together what your kids could do to make a mourner
in their community feel supported. (As a follow-up, in one synagogue
school, for example, the second graders researched how many mourners
their congregation had in a typical year and then produced that number
of cards to be sent on behalf of the congregation at the appropriate time.)
If you know of someone in your community who has lost someone in
their family, observed the practice of saying Kaddish and who would be a
sensitive and engaging speaker, invite them to come in and discuss what it
was like to observe this ritual. (Make sure they know, though, that it’s not
appropriate to lecture. Instead, invite them to tell stories about the person
they lost, how it makes them feel and what it was like to say Kaddish.)
2. The Sneetches: This Dr. Seuss book is a wonderful way to expose kids
to the ideas of prejudice, discrimination, conformity (and commodification). Read this book aloud and talk carefully about what’s going on in it
both as you read and after. Kids will often listen, but they may not always
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understand the story. What do your kids think happens after the book
ends? We like following up this book with a “stand-and-smile” exercise
meant to show ways that the kids in your class are alike and different from
each other. Ask the kids to stand up, smile and thumb their chests when
you say a statement that applies to them. (“I have brown hair.”; “I’m seven
years old.”; “I’m wearing white shoes.”; “I have a star on my belly.”) The
kids themselves can take turns supplying statements once the pattern is set
up.
3. Holocaust Picture Books: There are an increasing number of picture
books about the Holocaust targeted for young children. Many of them are
very good: sweetly storied, rich in Jewish culture, enfolding loss within
continuity, emotionally moving. All of them may evoke complex questions, though, which you should think about how you’ll engage before
beginning, questions like: “Why do people go to war?” “Why did people
blame Jews?” “What happens when people die?” Don’t be afraid of asking
the kids to elaborate their own thoughts about each of these issues. Don’t
feel, in other words, that it’s your job to answer questions. It is worth
reiterating, too, that we suggest the titles below for single class period
readings. We don’t recommend that you read more than one of these to
your students as this age child is simply too young for a mini-unit.
A few of the titles we especially like include: Grandma Esther Remembers
is great for younger grades and includes beautiful photographs. It is not too
graphic of a story, but it is still honest with a great layout and perfect for activity
extension ideas (a good recipe for tsimmes too). The Tattooed Torah follows
the story of a Torah through the war (and after,) and in that way shields readers
from thinking too much about people. The subtitle of One Yellow Daffodil
claims that it is a Hanukkah story, but it is really a Holocaust story, and a good
one to read on Yom HaShoah rather than Hanukkah. The Feather-Bed Journey
is a gorgeous book about a family’s (and a mattress’) transformations from generation to generation. Because the storyteller’s family is killed, it’s better for
older children. The Never-Ending Greenness has Van Gogh-ish illustrations,
and follows a young boy’s childhood in Poland as the Germans take-over. It follows his subsequent move to a ghetto, his escape and his life planting trees in
Israel after the war. The Terrible Things is marketed as an “allegory of the
Holocaust,” and tells a version of Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous quotation,
“First they came for the communists, but I wasn’t a communist, so I didn’t speak
up…” through the use of animals. If you use the book, it’s important to talk
about why the “terrible things” did what they did. For a nice follow-up activTEACHING YOUNG CHILDREN ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST—17

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ity, Simone once saw a teacher have his students break up into animal groups
shown in the book, and each group had to think up what they would do if the
“terrible things” were trying to catch them. What could they have done if they
had known what was coming? How could the animal groups have organized a
resistance? Have them brainstorm and act out their resistance plans.

Fourth–Fifth Grades
It’s worth noting that, except for the first two, all of the picture books in the
section above work beautifully with fourth and fi fth graders, too.
1. More Picture Books: These picture books are more explicit, more
depressing, more graphic or more evocative than the preceding ones, which
is why it’s worth reading them aloud to the whole class or a small group and
discussing them together.
The Yanov Torah is Simone’s favorite Holocaust book for fourth/fifth
graders since it reveals glimpses of human atrocity but through the lens of
the holiness of Torah. It’s the true story of a Torah smuggled into a labor
camp one scroll at a time. We suggest you edit out the last section of the
book which focuses on the Torah’s being smuggled out of the former Soviet
Union, not because it isn’t interesting reading, but because it takes about
45 minutes to read the whole book in total without that section. In Nine
Spoons a grandmother explains to her grandchildren the origins of a very
unusual Hanukkiah that she lights every year. The Hanukkiah was crafted
from spoons in a children’s barracks of a slave labor camp. The illustrations
are not great, but the story is very moving—uplifting, but still provocative,
and centered on Jewish survival and continuity. You may want to not show
the pictures and have students design the Hanukkiah themselves, based on
their imaginations. Rose Blanche is told from the perspective of a young,
non-Jewish German girl who smuggles food to a group of children in a
nearby concentration camp. This story requires some explanation as fourth
graders often don’t understand the last few pages of the book where Rose
Blanche herself is killed since it’s only implied. The pictures are riveting,
and the bleakness of the story is tremendously powerful. You can have
students write letters to Rose Blanche’s mother, pretending that they survived their stay in the concentration camp thanks to Rose Blanche’s food.
Passage to Freedom: The Sugihara Story discusses the amazing rescue
activities of Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat in Kovno who was able to save
thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. It is told from the perspective of
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his young son. Make it a point to read aloud the Afterward to your students, too; written by Sugihara’s actual son, Hiroki, which discusses the
repercussions post-war of Sugihara’s rescue activities. Luba: The Angel
of Bergen-Belsen is based on the actual rescue activities of a Dutch heroine. This book contains a marvelous Epilogue, which you should read
aloud. The Grey Striped Shirt is a little longer than the others and will
take more than a single class period to read aloud. It is about a little girl who
finds a grandparent’s concentration camp uniform in the closet. The story
discusses the Holocaust in very simple terms as the grandparents explain
their experiences to her. There are no graphic images.
2. Family Book Groups: There are a number of good chapter books for
kids of this age, too. If your students are strong readers, you can assign
them to read these books aloud to their parents at home, chapter by chapter,
and you can discuss the chapters in class. It’s a great opportunity for family
education, too. For example, you can organize “book groups”: kids in one,
parents in another, then 2-3 families in each group, etc. You can have one
family session at the mid-point of a book and another at its conclusion. The
kids might put on a skit of a powerful scene for the parents and vice versa,
to serve as launching points for the discussions. The three best chapter
books, interestingly, all focus on girls’ experiences: Number the Stars,
The Devil’s Arithmetic, and The Upstairs Room.
3. Films: There are not many good fi lms for this age child, but there are two
that are both excellent in different ways. If you can find a copy, Daniel’s
Story is the video accompaniment to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum’s exhibit for young children. It takes about 14 minutes and brings
up many questions specifically about the Holocaust, and yet it is not graphic
or scary. It’s a great video that sadly went out of print, but lots of Jewish
institutions own it and would likely loan it out. Another good one is the
Frontline fi lm, A Class Divided (sometimes referred to as the “browneye/blue-eye” experiment). Students are very adept at analyzing why the
kids acted the ways they did, what they should learn from the simulation,
and how antisemitism works as a form of racism. We recommend that
students watch the video and talk about how they think they would have
reacted rather than having teachers perform this kind of simulation.

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Resources for Teaching
(Please see the section above for detailed summaries or highpoints of the books
listed below.)
A Class Divided. Website: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/
divided/. This website houses the Frontline film in which Jane Eliot divides her kids into
blue-eyed and brown-eyed kids. It’s moving and fascinating, and despite the fact that it
looks somewhat dated (made in 1968), all kids get involved in it quickly.
Daniel’s Story. Produced by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1993, 14
minutes. This short video, though now out of print, was distributed to Jewish institutions
as part of the Jewish Heritage Video Collection.
The Devil’s Arithmetic. Written by Jane Yolen and published by Puffin Books,
London, 1990.
The Feather-Bed Journey. Written by Paula Kruzband Feder and published by
Albert Whitman & Co., Morton Grove, IL, 1995.
The Feather Merchants & Other Tales of the Fools of Chelm. Written by
Steve Sanfield and published by Scholastic Books, New York, 1991.
Flora’s Blanket. Written by Debi Gliori and published by Orchard Books,
London, 2001.
Grandma Esther Remembers. Written by Ann Morris and published by
Millbrook Press, Brookfield, CT, 2002.
The Grey Striped Shirt. Written by Jacqueline Jules and published by Alef
Design Group, Los Angeles, 1997.
Hannah’s Sabbath Dress. Written by Itzhak Schweiger-Dmi’El and published
by Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996.
Joseph Had a Little Overcoat. Written by Simms Tabak and published by
Viking Children’s Books, New York, 1999. This version of the book won a Caldecott
Medal.
Luba: The Angel of Bergen-Belsen. As told to Michelle R. McCann by Luba
Tryszynska-Frederick and published by Tricycle Press, Berkeley, 2003.
The Never-Ending Greenness. Written by Neil Waldman and published by
Morrow Junior Books, New York, 1997.
Nine Spoons. Written by Marci Stillerman and published by Hachai Publishing,
Brooklyn, 2002.
Number the Stars. Written by Lois Lowry and published by Houghton Miffl in,
New York, 1998.
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One Yellow Daffodil. Written by David Adler and published by Harcourt
Brace, Orlando, 1995.
Passage to Freedom: The Sugihara Story. Written by Ken Mochizuki and
published by Lee & Low Books, New York, 1997.
Rose Blanche. Written by Roberto Innocenti and published by Harcourt Brace,
New York, 2003.
The Sneetches. Written by Dr. Seuss and published by Random House, New
York, 1961.
The Tattooed Torah. Written by Marvell Ginsburg and published by UAHC
Press, New York, 1983.
The Terrible Things. Written by Eve Bunting and published by the Jewish
Publication Society, New York, 1989.
The Upstairs Room. Written by Johanna Reiss and published by Harper
Trophy, New York, 1990.
The Yanov Torah. Written by Erwin Herman, published by Kar-Ben
Publishing, Toronto, 1985.
You Never Know: A Legend of The Lamed-Vavniks. Written by Francine
Prose and published by Greenwillow, New York, 1998.

Resources for Further Learning
Auschwitz Explained to my Child. Written by Annette Wieviorka and
published by Marlowe and Company, New York, 2002. This is an excellent introduction to the Holocaust, written as a series of common questions children have and the
kinds of answers we as parents wish we could supply. Not suitable for young children,
though, given its graphic content.
Incorporating Holocaust Education into K-4 Curriculum and Teaching in
the United States. Written by Harriett Seppinwall. The full text is available at: http://www.chgs.umn.edu/Educational_Resources /Curriculum
/Incorporating_ Holocaust_Educat/incorporating_holocaust_educat.html. The
website is produced by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of
Minnesota and the full texts of responses to her article are posted there as well.

Should there be Holocaust education for K-4 students? The answer is “No.”
Written by Samuel Totten. The full text is available at: http://www.chgs.umn.
edu/Educational_Resources/Curriculum/Curriculum_Concerns/curriculum_concerns.html.The website is produced by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide
Studies at the University of Minnesota.
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Should There Be Holocaust Education for K-4 Students? A Reply to Dr. Samuel
Totten. Written by Heike Deckert Peaceman. This article is one of a series which
addresses the question of how old is old enough for students to learn about the Holocaust. It
was written in response to Samuel Totten’s arguments (cited below).

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NAMING THE HOLOCAUST

Warsaw ghetto residents attend a memorial service for a relative buried in the Warsaw cemetery. August, 1940.
USHMM, courtesy of Gene Berkowicz.

I

n teaching about the Holocaust, we often start with a lecture/discussion of the very terms people have used to describe its events. This is
both a useful and a necessary preface to actually teaching about the Holocaust.
While many (if not all?) of your students will have heard of the Holocaust, they
may or may not have heard the terms, ‘Final Solution,’ or Churb’n. But teaching
these terms isn’t only about enriching your students’ vocabulary. Teaching these
terms, focusing your students’ attention on the language they use to describe
the Holocaust, is one way for them to begin the difficult project of learning to
think critically. After all, each of these terms casts the meaning of the Holocaust
differently. Certain terms imply Jewish perspectives (Churb’n/Shoah) or Nazi
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perspectives (‘Final Solution’); other terms have decidedly political consequences
(genocide). Even the ways that we write these terms or speak them have political
overtones. What does it mean, for example, to capitalize the “H” in Holocaust
vs. writing it with a lower-case “h”? Is there only one Holocaust, or are there
holocausts? Does the distinction matter? In Simone’s years of teaching, her eighth
grade students were as adept as her college students at discussing the issues and
implications involved in using different terms.
When teaching these terms, we usually lecture about their meanings first since
we assume that most students don’t know their derivations, even when they have
heard the terms themselves. We think of teaching in this instance as providing
a kind of baseline or platform of understanding that enables everyone to participate in discussions afterwards. We like to teach about each term and then pause
to ask the following questions: What does this term imply? What’s good about
this term? What are the problems this term raises? Who do you think uses this
term now, and how? And, how is it different to use this term now than it was
when the term first appeared? After we have discussed each term’s pros and cons,
we ask students to consider which terms are most popular now, why they think
that is, and which of the terms they prefer to use and why. We encourage you
to make sure that your students know how you’ll be using these terms, too, as
those decisions will elucidate how you’ve structured their learning this content.
In the following section, the names for the Holocaust are listed in approximate
chronological order of their appearance, and some implications of each name are
included.
The big ideas of this chapter are that:
• There are many terms used to refer to the Holocaust, all of which carry
particular implications.
• Your students should learn the terms and discuss their implications, which
should expose you, as their teacher, to their orientations towards this history and vice versa (expose them to your orientation).
The key terms of this chapter include: ‘Final Solution’, Adolf Hitler, Wermacht,
Einsatzgruppen, Wannsee Conference, Churb’n, genocide, Rafael Lemkin,
Auschwitz, Theodore Adorno, Holocaust, Shoah, Gezerot tash-tashah, and
Poreimas.

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Terms for the Event
‘Final Solution’ (1941): This term was used originally by the upper echelons
of the Nazi hierarchy to describe the mass murder of Jews, or, in Nazi terminology, the ‘Final Solution’ to the so-called ‘Jewish Question.’ Though it was used
within the Nazi government to mean other, preliminary steps in the process of
annihilation, this was the term which ultimately referred to the plan to murder
all of European (and eventually all of world) Jewry.
Hermann Goering was one of the original members of Hitler’s party, one of
the few who supported him even before Adolf Hitler was elected to office in
1933. As such, he became an exceedingly important member of Hitler’s cabinet,
overseeing and coordinating armament agencies. On July 13, 1941, Goering sent
out the following order, which referred (only obliquely) to the planned mass
murder of Jews:
I hereby commission you to carry out all necessary preparations with
regard to organizational, substantive and financial viewpoints for a
total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.
Insofar as the competencies of other central organizations are hereby
affected, these are to be involved.
I further commission you to submit to me promptly an overall plan
showing the preliminary organizational, substantive, and financial
measures for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish
question.
Although this order was sent to a subordinate of Goering’s in July, which one
might assume meant that the mass murder of Jews was not yet in place, the opposite is the case. Though there is some disagreement among scholars, most now
believe that the plan to murder European Jews as an entire group was already in
place by June 22, 1941, when the German army (the Wermacht) advanced into
the Soviet Union. Attached to these army units were so-called ‘special units,’
Einsatzgruppen, whose job it was to round up Jews from the areas overtaken
and to shoot them en masse. By September 1941, the Nazis were already experimenting with Zyklon B gas at Auschwitz to see whether it could be used to kill
people; in December, they were experimenting with gas vans at Chelmno to
establish exactly how. Clearly, by then, the policy of mass murder had already
been established.
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On January 20, 1942, the top leaders of the Third Reich, the Nazi German
government, gathered to decide how best to implement Goering’s orders. They
met just outside of Berlin at Wannsee, which is why this conference is referred
to (in English) as the Wannsee Conference. Commonly associated with the
origination of the term, ‘Final Solution,’ the actual ‘Final Solution’ was already
underway.
Some notes on the term: Like the majority of language used in Nazi talk,
policy and documentation, the term ‘Final Solution’ is euphemistic, that is, it
doesn’t refer directly to what it means, but shrouds its meaning. The very euphemism, however, illuminates Nazi ideology since mass murder of Jews was seen
as a ‘solution.’ A problem of the term is therefore that it doesn’t seem to include
non-Jewish victims of Nazi genocide (for example Sinti and Roma, who used
to be referred to as ‘Gypsies.’) As a side note, we never allow students to write
the term (or other similar Nazi-generated terminology) without using single or
double quotation marks around it, if only to reinforce the notion that it is a Nazi
term and that it implies that the mass murder of Jews is positive. (Solution is a
positively weighted term.)
Churb’n: This Yiddish term for the Holocaust was used by Eastern European
Jews even as early as their being ghettoized, which in the case of Poland began in
1939. From the Hebrew root word, cherev, which means sword, the word came to
mean warfare. It had been the Yiddish term that Eastern European Jews used to
describe the destruction of the Temple, and before the ghettos were established
in Poland in 1939, the Yiddish term was used to describe any great catastrophe.
Some notes on the term: There is something especially appropriate about using
a Yiddish term—a term in a language whose embedding culture was wiped
out—to describe the destruction of European Jewry. That said, Yiddish was not
spoken by all Jews targeted by the Nazis. Greek Jews from the upper classes, for
example, sometimes spoke Greek at home, Ladino for Jewish celebrations, and
learned French and German as academic languages. Moreover, the term implies
again a kind of exclusion of non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, since the vast
majority of non-Jews did not speak Yiddish.
Genocide: Rafael Lemkin, a Polish born Jew, lost 49 members of his family
in the Holocaust. He coined the term genocide in his 1944 book, entitled, Axis
Rule in Occupied Europe. In the text, he describes that he wanted “to denote an
old practice in its modern development.” He used the term as a lawyer during the
Nuremberg Trials. One of the unsung heroes of the fight for universal human
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rights, Lemkin went on to almost single-handedly draft the Genocide Convention,
which he presented at the first meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco
in 1945. Leaving a truly historical legacy, he also almost single-handedly lobbied for its passage. On December 9, 1948, the UN approved the Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, which meant that nations incurred
moral, legal, and military consequences for those instances later deemed to be
genocide. By January of 1951, 20 countries had ratified the proposal.
Lemkin’s terminology provided an alternative term to ‘Final Solution,’ providing people with a way to talk about the Holocaust without using Nazi language.
The term genocide was also more general than ‘Final Solution,’ and referred
beyond the specific annihilation of Jews. Lemkin invented the prefi x from the
Greek root, gen from genus, which refers to birth. This is the same root found
in the words: gentleman, genius, genetics. He combined gen with the Latin cide
from the root cidera, which means to cut or kill. This is the same suffi x as found
in the words: homicide, suicide, deicide.
In regular usage, the term has come to mean “the deliberate extermination of
an ethnic or national group” (this according to the Oxford English Dictionary
definition). When he termed the phrase, though, Lemkin proposed the following definition:
Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings
of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential
foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be
the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture,
language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of
national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty,
health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such
groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity,
and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their
individual capacity but as members of a national group.
Notes on the term: Interestingly, there is no mention of political groups being
the potential victims of genocide according to this definition. The Russian emissary to the first UN meeting was present when the resolution passed and had
wanted to make sure that Stalin could not be considered guilty of genocide.
Sadly, as a result of the important moral, legal and economic consequences the
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term genocide carries with it, governments purposefully avoid using the term
in order to avoid intervention. Some people appreciate the clinical or scientific
sound of this term, implying as it does a calculated rationality to mass murder.
Others dislike the coldness it conveys, as if the term itself denies the humanity
of victims of genocide. As a side note, Lemkin believed that the term ought to
be capitalized whenever it was used as a way to further emphasize is horrendousness, no matter what the particulars. We do not capitalize it in this book as a way
to recognize its tragic everydayness, the fact that at this point in history, it seems
to occur frequently, if not constantly.
Auschwitz: Theodore Adorno, the great German-Jewish philosopher,
launched many thousands of essays in response to his famous quotation, “After
Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric.” While Adorno modified his claim somewhat after reading the poetry of Paul Celan, what is important for our purposes
is his use of Auschwitz to refer to the Holocaust as a whole. In the 1950s, it was
quite common for people to refer to the atrocities in general through reference
to the largest concentration and death camp, Auschwitz. Though it’s uncommon
today to speak about the Holocaust as Auschwitz, the use of the term then highlights how little was known in the immediate aftermath of the events.
Notes on the term: It could be said that Auschwitz has become a symbol for the
Holocaust and that using the term Auschwitz to refer to the Holocaust highlights
the central symbolic image of the gas chambers and crematoria. One problem
with this term, though, is that it tends to overshadow other kinds of experiences
Holocaust victims and survivors encountered. It used to be the case, for example,
that survivor only referred to a survivor of a concentration camp, whereas now
we tend to consider Holocaust survivors as those who spent the war years in hiding, in full view with false papers, in ghettos, forests, labor camps, etc. The term
is also a little vague since Auschwitz the camp included the camp Birkenau and
many smaller satellite camps, and since the name of the concentration camp was
also the name of the town (Oswiecim in Polish) in which it was located.
Holocaust: Elie Wiesel is said to have fathered this term in the same way that
Columbus discovered America; in other words, he was credited with its officiation, but was not in fact its inventor. He was, however, one of the first people to
use the term in print in the mid-1950s. That said, the term was not widely used
until the 1970s, following the airing of a television mini-series of the same name.
This term is now the most widely used, the most widely known, and perhaps as
a result, the most widely contested term for the atrocities committed under the
Nazi regime.
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The term comes from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which was
completed somewhere around 200 BCE. The Hebrew word being translated
was olah, from Genesis 22: 13: “Abraham went and took the ram and offered
him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.” The wholly burnt offering
here is the olah, and the Greek translation of the word was holocaust. The prefi x,
holo-, came from the Greek root, holos, which means whole, total, complete.
It’s the same prefi x as in the words holistic or hologram. The suffi x of the word
caust came from the root word caustos which means to burn. This is the same root
found in the word cauterize.
According to its etymology, then, the word Holocaust links the victimization
of Jews under the Third Reich to the almost-sacrifice of Isaac in the Hebrew
Bible. Many thinkers have objected to this linkage considering its ramifications.
The term itself likens the Jews murdered by Nazis and their collaborators to
Isaac, which implies that murders under the ‘Third Reich’ served a divine purpose. After all, God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. In that analogy,
too, the Nazis become God’s instruments, since they are likened to Abraham.
The implication throughout is that God played a role in the perpetration of
these events, or at least, that God was included in their universe. The term itself,
in short, locates these specific atrocities within a theological terrain, which for
many people, is unacceptable. The Holocaust, they might argue, despite this
term, was not an example of God’s inhumanity to man, but of man’s inhumanity
to man, or, put in non-sexist language, people’s capacity for inhumanity.
Notes on the term: Most of the early debates swirling around use of this
term concerned its theological underpinnings. Since the term has become so
widely used and widely understood, most of the more recent debates concern
its vagueness. Does the Holocaust include only Jewish victims of the Nazis or
all victimized groups? Is there only one Holocaust (so that it should be capitalized), or are there many examples of holocausts? And, does the Holocaust refer
to all of the anti-Jewish activity in Nazi Germany (which would mean it began
in 1933), or does it refer only to those activities that were directed towards mass
murder (which would mean that most people date it to 1939, the establishment
of ghettos, or to 1941, the year the ‘Final Solution’ became operationalized)?
These days, when people write about the Holocaust, they typically define their
terminology along these axes in order to orient their readers. In this book, we
capitalize the Holocaust to indicate its special status in history, but we consider
the Holocaust to have included not only Jewish victims, but all of it victims,
Jewish and non-Jewish.
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Shoah: This Hebrew term, like Holocaust, has Biblical origins, but this time,
those origins are not connected to the will of God as much as to destruction
wrought by human hands. For many, then, the term, Shoah, is preferable to the
term, Holocaust. The Hebrew word appears in Proverbs 1: 27, “When your fear
cometh as desolation (shoah) and your destruction comes as a whirlwind.” This
prophecy references the destruction of the great Jewish Temple, which some
have argued is a historic rather than a religious event. The enemies of the Biblical
people Israel devastated the great Temple; God did not.
Notes on the term: For some, the fact that this term is in Hebrew is positive.
That it is in Hebrew implies that the Shoah, unlike the Holocaust, is about an
event in Jewish history, as opposed to an event in European or world history,
and that it concerns Jewish victimization, rather than the victimization of Soviet
prisoners of war, Sinti or Roma (previously known as ‘Gypsies’), Jehovah’s
Witnesses, or other persecuted groups.
Gezerot tash–tashah: It used to be the case that in ultra-Orthodox Jewish
communities, the Holocaust was referred to obliquely as “the Decrees of 1939
– 1945.” (Tash-tashah refers in shorthand to the years 1939-1945 in the Hebrew
calendar.) Stated this way, the decrees allow the period to be thought of as either
God’s work or humans’, though gezerot were usually considered human decrees.
More recently, however, the ubiquity of the term, Holocaust, has meant that it
has seeped into ultra-Orthodox Jewish usage.
Poreimas: The group that used to be called ‘Gypsies’ now refer to themselves as
Sinti and Roma, the names of the most prominent family groupings in Germany
and Austria respectively. The term Roma often refers to both groups now. ‘Gypsy’
was not only a term that had become derogatory, but it was originally applied to
this group when they were thought to have originated in Egypt. In fact, the Sinti
and Roma originated in Northern India and migrated to Europe during the
Middle Ages. The Romani term for the Holocaust is Poreimas, which translates
roughly as “the devouring.” Referring to the specific devouring of the Sinti and
Roma during the Holocaust, this term is relatively recent and not many Roma
use it or recognize it. Almost directly opposite of Jewish tradition, Roma tradition espouses a kind of forgetting, a dismissal of history in favor of “seizing the
day.” As the historian, Inga Clendinnen puts it, “they have chosen not to bother
with history at all, because to forget, with a kind of defiant insouciance…is the
Gypsy [sic] way of enduring.”6
6

Teaching Ideas
1. Your Preference: Ask your students to simply write for a few minutes
about which term they prefer, why, and what it says about them as people.
Some teachers refer to this as a “thinking break,” an opportunity for each
student to collect their thoughts and form opinions individually before
discussing them as a group. To begin the discussion, ask each student to
go around the room, share their preference, and give one reason for that
preference. Make sure your students know that they are entitled to have
different opinions about the matter, and that they need not debate which
term is right. How would they go about asking others to use the term they
think of as the best one?
2. Word Bubbling: After hearing this list of terms and their origins, try
having your students freely associate words. What do they associate with
one of these terms? Go around the room, and encourage the students, as
fast as they can, to mention the next word that pops into their minds. You
can do this activity in pairs or as a group. You can also do this activity
aloud (which is preferable because it’s a quicker form) or in writing (which
is preferable because it’s more private). If the activity gets to silly words,
it’s a great opportunity to discuss why; why do you think your mind tends
towards funny or lightweight associations rather than dwelling in horror?
What can that tell us about the endeavor of studying the Holocaust?
3. Conceptual Mapping: After distributing blank pieces of colored paper,
scissors and tape, ask your students to “map” these words visually. How do
they see the relationships between these terms? Which terms are the larger
categories or the smaller categories? Which terms are umbrella terms or
tree root terms? After the students have had a chance to think and intellectually map, have them explain aloud why they designed their maps as they
did.
The famous Israeli historian of the Holocaust, Yehuda Bauer, for example, puts genocide and Holocaust on the same continuum, but argues that
genocide is less extreme than Holocaust. After all, according to Lemkin’s
definition, genocide can refer to the moral corruption of victims or to the
appropriation of economic advantage by the perpetrators, both of which
are less extreme than mass murder.
4. Uses of the Term: If you or your students have access to the web during
school hours, it’s a fascinating activity to look at some of the uses of the
term, Holocaust. At the time of this writing, for example, there is a slide
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show at the website for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
(PETA), which compares the mass murders of victims, not explicitly Jews,
during the Holocaust to the slaughter of animals for mass consumption
today. The slide show is entitled “Holocaust on Your Plate,” and it contains
quotations like: “To animals, all people are Nazis,” (attributed to Isaac
Bashevis Singer, the writer of Yiddish comedic fiction), and “Our grandchildren will ask us one day, ‘Where were you during the Holocaust of the
animals?’” The slides are carefully paired to show, on the left-hand side,
images of emaciated or tortured people, and on the right, a visually similar
image of emaciated or tortured animals. PETA members would like you to
consider the paired images as morally equivalent, not only visually similar.
Thus the slide show not only elevates the cause of veganism, but denigrates
the sanctity of human life.
In addition, there used to be a record store in San Mateo, California, called
‘The Vinyl Solution.’ And there’s a famous episode of the television show,
Seinfeld, called the ‘Soup Nazi.’ These examples and others, which your
students can bring to your attention, can catalyze important discussions
around questions like these: When should the word, Holocaust be used
for an event other than this Holocaust? When should any of these words
be used? What happens to these original meanings when they’re used for
non-historical purposes? Should the term Holocaust be considered sacred
in some way? Why or why not? Why is it people refer to the Holocaust
in these ways? How do you feel about these uses, and what do you feel it’s
important to do about them?
5. Charting Genocide: An introduction to names for the Holocaust can
help your students begin to identify the axes that are important in understanding all genocides. As your students listen to your lecture, have them
write a list of factors that seem important. Their lists might include, for
example, the intention of the perpetrators (to conquer, exploit or murder),
the parts annihilated (culture/economy/people), wartime or peace-time,
etc. Brainstorm the list together, and then have the students group and sort
them. Then, create a chart together that lists the features of all genocides.
As your study progresses, you may want students to refer back to this chart,
noting how some of these aspects changed. And, when your study of the
Holocaust is complete, your students should be able to use these features to
compare the Holocaust to other instances of genocide.

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Resources for Teaching and Further Learning
Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey. Written by Isabel
Fonseca and published by Vintage Books, New York, 1996. Though relatively little
of this book deals with the Sinti and Roma’s experiences during the Holocaust, the section
that does is, like the rest of the book, beautifully written, personal and fascinating.
A History of the Holocaust. Written by Yehuda Bauer and published by
Scholastic Books, New York 2001. A fabulous and thorough textbook. Useful as a
reference text.
The Holocaust in American Life. Written by Peter Novick and published by
Houghton Miffl in, Boston, 1999. Crafted by an eminent historian, this book documents public attitudes towards the Holocaust in the U.S.A. in the decades since 1945.
Though sometimes his narration is too glib for our taste, the book is excellent. With regards
to this chapter’s content, it ably documents the political uses to which the Holocaust has
been put.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Website: http://www.
masskilling.com/exhibit.html . This website contains a gruesome slide show entitled
“Holocaust on Your Plate” in which the term, Holocaust, is applied, graphically, to the
slaughter of animals for mass consumption.
A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide. Written by
Samantha Power and published by Basic Books, New York, 2002. A phenomenal
study of U.S. involvement (and non-involvement) in the genocides of the 20th century,
this book contains chapters on Lemkin, the Holocaust, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda and other
genocides.
Reading the Holocaust. Written by Inga Clendinnen and published by
University Press, Cambridge, England, 1999. A beautifully written set of reflections on Holocaust scholarship, this book weaves the way through various historiographical
dilemmas.
While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust. Written by Jeffrey
Shandler and published by Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999. This seminal book examines how the Holocaust was transmitted via popular culture to millions of
Americans, and how it became a cultural icon as a result.